A piano, a pregnant woman and a prison: Chandler's Nightmare published in Strand Magazine

A rarely seen Raymond Chandler sketch, Nightmare, has been published this week in The Strand Magazine, offering readers a new window into the creator of The Long Goodbye, Farewell, My Lovely and other crime classics. The brief piece imagines Chandler himself in prison somewhere, awaiting a murder he says he does not remember committing. In the cell are two men he does not recognize, a pregnant woman named Elsa, and a piano in the corner that, by the narrator’s account, must be played lying down after nine o'clock. The nightmarish scene deepens as Chandler learns of his likely fate, all conveyed in a compact, suggestive prose that fans of his work will recognize as distinctly his.

As I was wondering, apparently rather audibly, about the date set for my execution, the guard said to me, ‘After a bit you’ll get a letter with the envelope addressed in your own writing. That will tell you the date for your hanging.’ Chandler wrote. “Nightmare,” though brief, presents a paradoxical mood for the detective novelist known for cool, precise prose: a sense of inevitability, claustrophobia and an uncanny puzzle that points toward a mind wrestling with guilt, memory and fate. The piece notes a rule in the dream that the piano must be played lying down after nine, a detail that contributes to the sense of disorientation and ritual the sketch conveys.

Nightmare was found recently among the papers of Chandler's assistant, Jean Vounder-Davis, and was sold last year through the Doyle auction house. The cache included other items tied to Chandler’s career, such as his 1953 Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter, unpublished drafts of early novels and a two-page list of 46 things he hated, among them “golf talk” and “novels about people who can’t make any money.” Strand Managing Editor Andrew F. Gulli purchased Nightmare at auction but declined to say how much was paid. In the current Strand edition, Gulli described the piece as a perfect illustration of Chandler’s ability to evoke so much with so little. He said Nightmare was likely written in the early 1950s, before the death of Chandler’s wife, Cissy, who is referenced in a footnote. Cissy Pascal Chandler died in 1954, five years before Chandler’s own death.

Scholars who have studied Chandler’s correspondence and notebooks say Nightmare fits into a broader pattern of wry, spontaneous notes the author left for Vounder-Davis. Tom Williams, a Chandler biographer and professor, notes that the fragment-like mood of Nightmare offers a different facet of Chandler’s imagination—one that mingles noir fatalism with playful, almost absurd touches. Williams described the piece to The Associated Press as part of a special category of Chandler’s marginalia that reveals how the author sometimes played with the idea that his success came easily, even as the notes hint at rejection or uncertainty in earlier years. “Chandler liked to imply that his success writing crime stories came easily, and he told a friend that his first story, ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,’ was picked up straightaway,” Williams said in an email. “The note about a letter revealing the date of hanging raises questions about how he confronted the fear of failure and the limits of memory in his own life.”

The publication of Nightmare adds another layer to the public’s view of Chandler as both a novelist and a writer who left behind a constellation of fragments and reflections. While Nightmare may be short, its imagery—prison, a pregnant woman, a piano that must be played lying down after nine, and the chilling construct of a letter that confirms one’s doom—resonates with the mood that underpins much of Chandler’s best work. The Strand’s editors describe the piece as emblematic of Chandler’s “ability to evoke so much with so little,” a trait that has long fascinated readers and scholars alike. The discovery, along with other archival items in Vounder-Davis’s papers, underscores the enduring interest in the author’s process and the sometimes uneasy boundary between Chandler the craftsperson and Chandler the myth.

The Strand piece’s dating is not specified in the publication, but the accompanying notes and the contextual footnotes suggest it likely predates Chandler’s wife’s passing in 1954. If correct, Nightmare would be part of a late-postwar period when Chandler was at the height of his crime-writing career but still producing shorter, experimental lines outside of his published novels. The discovery also raises questions for scholars about how much of Chandler’s private scripting aligns with, or diverges from, the world he created in his celebrated novels and screenplays.

In publishing Nightmare, The Strand Magazine contributes to a broader curatorial project: to gather and present marginalia, fragments and unpublished pieces that illuminate Chandler’s creative habits. The newly surfaced sketch, though compact, invites readers to view Chandler not only as the master of the noir novel but as a writer who jotted down strange, unsettling ideas in moments of private reflection. As with many authors who maintain a sharp public persona, Nightmare exposes a more intimate side of Chandler—a writer who could conjure a dreamscape of confinement and memory that feels both peculiar and prescient to fans of his enduring body of work.